I’ve been hooked on tornadoes since I was a kid. I used to dream I was lying in my backyard as a black funnel cloud passed silently—and safely—over me. A shrink later told me the dream represented “safe danger,” but I never understood half of what he said, including that. As I grew older, I became a climate dilettante. I read about global warming and the coming ice age, wondered why barometric pressure affected dogs, and drew cloud charts in my daily planner. I saw Twister,��of course. And I kept having that dream.

I wanted to see a real storm��for myself, but there was the business of finishing grad school and raising kids. So I back-burnered tornadoes��for decades and nearly forgot about them. Then,��last winter, I saw a blurb in a travel magazine about stormchasing tours. I thought only Hollywood actors or meteorology nerds were allowed to chase tornadoes. But for $2,300 a week, I could, too. I justified it to my��now adult children, saying that if I died, at least it would be while doing something incredibly cool.

And I did. Not die—do something cool.��

I decided to book the��Mayhem 1 tour with , one of some 20 stormchasing outfits in the country, which��promises a 90 percent chance of seeing a tornado over the course of six days. Not only��was the company vetted by the review site��, it had fewer people per van��and was relatively affordable compared with��others (many run��$2,500 and up). All��trips are based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the epicenter of Tornado Alley, a swath of land that runs from central Texas to South Dakota and��spawns many of the approximately 1,200 events each year.

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